Time under tension?

Started by LetsTrain, December 28, 2011 · 6 Replies · 4,471 Views

LetsTrain

Hi, I have some questions about the concept of time under tension in handstand work. Coach Sommer mention the that sets of 0-20 sec. are used for pure strenght...20-40 sec. for strenght/hypertrophy...40+ sec. for pure endurance. However, I just don't understand how to evaluate those time ranges because Coach hasn't mention which factor forces you to stop whithin those time ranges. In my opininon, I believe it should be your overall muscle fatigue that should force you to quit and not your balance. Is it the case? I mean, someone may not be able to hold a free handstand for more then 10 seconds but it doesn't means that this guy is working pure strenght, right? ...under 10sec., there a good chance some people wouldn't have even break a swet. In this case, the gains in strenght won't be that significants and it's more his pure ability to maintain a handstand that will benefit the most..am I right?

Also, since a lot of people on this forum don't like the idea of going to failure, I'm wondering when you should stop your handstand? About 70-80% muscular effort or more 80-90%? Personally, I feel that 80-90% is great!...and not that much of a failure. In my case, this 80-90% effort mostly occurs at 50 seconds to 1min. in a free handstand. This is when my overall body condition (muscles...) forces me to stop the handstand. Am I doing it right? (Note that at 80-90% effort, I believe I could sometime continu a tad more if I hadn't lost the balance...so it's not really a total «muscular failure» but more an «overall body exhaustion who affect my ability to maintain a handstand»...lets say :P ).

Thanks for the helps,

Keep training!

Joshua Naterman
LetsTrain said:
Hi, I have some questions about the concept of time under tension in handstand work. Coach Sommer mention the that sets of 0-20 sec. are used for pure strenght...20-40 sec. for strenght/hypertrophy...40+ sec. for pure endurance. However, I just don't understand how to evaluate those time ranges because Coach hasn't mention which factor forces you to stop whithin those time ranges. In my opininon, I believe it should be your overall muscle fatigue that should force you to quit and not your balance. Is it the case? I mean, someone may not be able to hold a free handstand for more then 10 seconds but it doesn't means that this guy is working pure strenght, right? ...under 10sec., there a good chance some people wouldn't have even break a swet. In this case, the gains in strenght won't be that significants and it's more his pure ability to maintain a handstand that will benefit the most..am I right?

Also, since a lot of people on this forum don't like the idea of going to failure, I'm wondering when you should stop your handstand? About 70-80% muscular effort or more 80-90%? Personally, I feel that 80-90% is great!...and not that much of a failure. In my case, this 80-90% effort mostly occurs at 50 seconds to 1min. in a free handstand. This is when my overall body condition (muscles...) forces me to stop the handstand. Am I doing it right? (Note that at 80-90% effort, I believe I could sometime continu a tad more if I hadn't lost the balance...so it's not really a total «muscular failure» but more an «overall body exhaustion who affect my ability to maintain a handstand»...lets say :P ).

Thanks for the helps,

Keep training!

Depends on what motor groups you are training. The time frames come from the energy systems used to power the movements. If you are working hard enough to challenge your largest and strongest motor groups then you are going to run out of gas in 8-10s if you are highly trained, because that's the absolute max amount of time that creatine phosphate can power exercise in one bout. That is pure strength work. 10+ to 45-60s is your anaerobic strength/endurance, with there being an obvious continuous shift from a higher degree of absolute strength to a higher degree of strength/endurance as the time under tension gets longer. Anaerobic glycolysis, which powers that second time range predominantly, is not able to continue past that timeframe, particularly with continuous or nearly continuous tension.

The 20-40s range tends to give the overall best mix of time under tension and high percentage of motor unit recruitment, which means you are able to efficiently train a large part of the muscle. That trained part then grows stronger if you give the correct nutrients at the correct time, and give enough time for healing and new growth to occur. This leads to the most hypertrophy.

During pure strength training, you should not break a sweat from the actual exercise in most cases. You are simply not generating enough heat to warrant sweating.

It sounds to me like you need to find some sites or preferably a reasonably new textbook that teaches you the basics of exercise physiology, it takes too much time to type a book.

LetsTrain

Thanks for the useful information :wink: (Great explanation, you know your stuff for sure!)

slizzardman said:
It sounds to me like you need to find some sites or preferably a reasonably new textbook that teaches you the basics of exercise physiology, it takes too much time to type a book.

Like you said it's time I get some other books :lol: I was already planning to buy «Supertraining» by Mel Siff and «Exercise Physiology: Energy, Nutrition and Human Performance» by McArdle. It will be very useful informations.

Thanks again for your response.

Keep Training!

Joshua Naterman

Professor Andrew Doyle or Andy Doyle should have all of last year's lectures for free on I-tunes as well. 3650 is the course number and exercise physiology is the class name. Georgia State University is the name of the school.

The book we used was:

Exercise Physiology: Theory and Application to Fitness

and Performance. Scott K. Powers & Edward T. Howley,

7th Ed. McGraw-Hill, 2009.

He has done a good bit of the research on the endurance aspect of this field, a very good guy to learn from. He helped write a good bit of the ACSM books, for what that's worth.

I also like the look of the book Physiology of Sport and Exercise Kenney, I think it will be better for most people here. McArdle's book seems to get much heavier into the anatomy, making it a bit more difficult to use but probably an excellent book as well. Having seen nothing but the Google previews of each I can't really say for sure which is the better buy, but based on what I have seen it looks like Kenney's book is better organized and much easier to understand, without losing any of the information. That may not be the actual case, but that is what it seems like to me.

Joshua Naterman
Cole Dano said:
Thanks for the info Josh, the Podcasts look very interesting. There is some much good info available there never need be a dull moment.

The books are so expensive that it pays to make an informed decision and search around. I just found McArdle at 58% off just by going for the international version vs U.S. version, that puts it within the budget.

http://www.bookdepository.com/Exercise-Physiology-William-McArdle/9781608318599/message/fDIwODIwXjQwfDIwMDMwXjQw

half.com is a fantastic resource as well